Liz Braun

Wednesday, September 13, 2017, 1:44 PM

You know that thing where you eat at some upscale restaurant and all the food is beautifully arranged on the plate and every morsel is delicious … but you’re still hungry when you leave?

You know that thing where you eat at some upscale restaurant and all the food is beautifully arranged on the plate and every morsel is delicious … but you’re still hungry when you leave?

That’s kind of the way it is with mother! , the new horror/psychological thriller/frenetic froofera from filmmaker Darren Aronofsky. This is a movie that we experienced as thrilling for the first hour and annoying for the second; the annoying part was likely just our own longing for a recognizable narrative structure.

Anyway, it all felt deeply unsatisfying.

mother! is a bit beyond language, so it’s as difficult to describe as any epic nightmare. The story concerns a couple who live alone in an isolated house, a fabulous old pile right out of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw .

Or The Haunting of Hill House. Or The Others.

Listen — pick a scare from your fave horror movie or novel. It’s all in here.

She (Jennifer Lawrence) is restoring the house after almost losing it in a fire.

He (Javier Bardem) is a poet going through terrible writer’s block.

The tension in the house is palpable, and the weird goings-on with her are electric: the beating heart of the house, the scary basement, the hideous solitude, the bloody floorboards, the mysterious medical condition — it’s all in here.

One day, he brings home a stranger (Ed Harris). Stay the night, says he.

No! says she. But the stranger stays the night. He admires the work of the poet. He’s a doctor. He must be okay. He has some horrible sickness.

Then his scary wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) arrives. Then their scary adult children. Violence and bloodshed ensue. And freaking chaos.

Lawrence’s character continues to trail around the house, waxing domestic and trying to protect her husband’s sacred creative space. But more and more strangers show up and the assaults on their privacy and their home begin to escalate.

She is pregnant. Now he and she are creating simultaneously, so perhaps art and nature can be in synch? Ha, ha — no. The various horrors keep mounting.

And where, we hear you asking, does it all lead?

Let’s just say that that may all be in the eye of the beholder. mother! is a film about — we're guessing here — the creative impulse, the muse, the public’s response to success, maybe the end of civilization as we know it. It is personal, political and persistent; it might only be about filmmaking itself, for all we know.

Which would be unfortunate.

Anyway, for sure it’s a love letter. You should know going in that Jennifer Lawrence and filmmaker Darren Aronofsky are a romantic couple, because otherwise you might start to get a bit squirmy about the male gaze involved. We have no problem staring at Jennifer Lawrence for two hours — lit and shot as she is as if Caravaggio were helming — but there’s a hint of the voyeur in it all that is uncomfortable after a while. Really, bro? Nipples-Through-Pyjama-Top again?